This is a pretty good article about the town next to the one I grew up in. I knew the young mayor, who is quoted in the article, as an even younger man, goofy and occasionally annoying to me, but definitely a good dude. I dated his sister and their family always made me feel accepted.
But there’s no hope here. Delphi is slightly bigger than my town, but it shrinks every year. As the article points out, there is an incredible generational gap here. It’s not just that the town is run down and kind of boring (beautiful as it actually is), there are also less and less opportunities to scrape a living out of the dirt or off the factory floor. There are sharp racial divisions as well, which this article doesn’t explore. The hog processing plant mentioned in the article employs a lot of immigrants and there is certainly some lingering resentment toward them, maybe for supposedly taking some of the few jobs, maybe for their inability or refusal to integrate. Probably both. The entire county is sharply segregated.
I really encourage reading this if you have a while. Living in small town America, at least there in central Indiana, feels a lot like dying- because that’s what it is. It’s the slow withering death of hope and promise.
Of course I’m not saying that I don’t think it’s worth living there. Having just moved out to Sandy, OR from Portland, I can say that I’ve actually really missed living in a rural area. The truth is, life itself is looking more and more bleak no matter where you are, so you should just stay wherever feels like home.
I’ve lived in towns that were slowly dying and in economically vibrant towns. There’s a difference, in the psychology, in the politics, in everything.
And, on paper, on a meta level, the Left absolutely should have something to offer the citizens of failing local communities.
But, the Left didn’t.
And, Indiana feels like dying, and it feels like nobody cares.
I mean, what could the left have offered these communities that they didn’t already offer (even if they potentially failed to deliver on due to divided government)?
The standard Democratic politician supports more infrastructure spending, renegotiating trade deals, bolstering unions, job re-education programs, more funding for public schools (which would probably disproportionately benefit poor rural areas that can’t easily fund their own schools), bailing out the car manufacturers, tax incentives for rural development, more access to health care, and the (broadly defined) welfare state.
Sure, these communities probably were going to economically decline anyway even if all those policies were done 100% as their designers had hoped, but I don’t see anything short of extremely inefficient and absurd crony capitalist subsidies for companies to stay put and absurd regulations against automation saving these towns economically, and if those things were done they would amount to basically be a very large (indirect) handout for the very same people who despise handouts when smaller amounts of money than it would take to save these towns are given to black and brown people in the cities who are also struggling and feel like nobody cares.
Which is why I can’t help but conclude that the resentment of the left of these rural flyover communities is more (though not entirely) cultural/racial/religious/ethno-nationalist.
It’s true there’s nothing (ie, not a lot) reasonable that technocratic center-leftism can offer dying communities. And because the Democratic party has a lot of fact-checking instincts that prevents outright lying, there’s not much they would.
But you don’t need to resort to ulterior motives to understand that people will vote for the party that DOES offer a solution (even if its a lie) over the one who says “we can’t solve your problem.”
And if a significant politically-dominant block of your country has an insoluble problem, then guess what, your country will keep voting for outright liars until something resolves their crisis.
A lot of the Trump angst focuses too much on specific American factors or the moral failings of various politicians in not reacting appropriately (it’s not the fault of Democratic messaging or their various small ball policy proposals). But we can see with the rise of an isolationist far-right across among almost every developed Western country, that it’s a fundamental reaction to trends across the whole world in the last few decades.
I should clarify that I don’t think economic distress is not a factor in this, it absolutely is. Maybe I downplayed it above. I believe that it is a necessary condition for the rise of the populist-nationalist-isolationist right. It doesn’t seem to be sufficient to explain what has happened, though. Especially when poor immigrants and poor racial and religious minorities aren’t flocking to these populist parties despite equal or greater economic distress. Especially when it seems like education rather than income is more predictive of support of support for these parties.
There are a lot of lefty politicians who will pretend that technocratic center-leftism will save these communities, and offer it up as a solution, and yet that wasn’t the message that resonated. I don’t think (most of) these people are racist or xenophobic, at least not in the harsh colloquial sense of those words, but I just can’t explain Trump or Brexit or LePen or Alternative for Germany without there being some sort of intense cultural/demographic anxiety involved (not all of which is irrational, I do think for instance that Germany probably took in too many refugees). Why this anxiety crosses borders is simply that, for good and for ill, globalization and neoliberalism allow for more cultural and demographic change than is normal in the west.
Yeah for certain there are a lot of center-left politicians offering lamppost solutions* when none might exist. And as we saw from America to Greece, much of the technocratic establishment is extremely eager to knee-cap far-left parties which precludes finding out whether their solutions would quell this uprising.
But the answer might be nihilism. In a society structured on identity-through-job, modernity (including increasing financialization, free trade, and automation) might just kill enough communities that the entire democratic consensus falls apart. I think it’s important to remove “having a job” as a necessary part of social identity (both for individuals and emergent structures like small towns) in the face of this capitalist revolution, but that’s not exactly easy to implement as a federalized governing agenda.
*As in when a drunk loses his keys on the street at night, and assumes they are under the lamppost, because if they aren’t he can’t find them anyway.
Wage subsidies might have been able to do the trick, and economists like them. They don’t seem to be on anyone’s radar, however, and the EITC is yearly which isn’t often enough to work.
Some part of me suspects the reason they aren’t on peoples’ radars is that rural whites were used as the fulcrum for identity politics, but maybe they’re simultaneously too boring while being too left wing.
